Guiding catheters are instruments that allow a physician to locate and cannulate vessels in a patient's heart for performing various medical procedures, including venography and implanting of cardiac pacing devices. Cannulating heart vessels requires navigating a small diameter, flexible guide through convoluted vasculature into a heart chamber, and then into a destination heart vessel. Once the destination heart vessel is reached, the catheter acts as a conduit for insertion of payloads into the vessel.
Once the vessel has been cannulated by a guiding catheter, an occlusion device may be utilized to hold the distal end of the guiding catheter in place during various procedures. The occlusion device blocks blood flow through the vessel at the same time lodging the catheter in place.
However, the blood flow cannot be blocked indefinitely, as occlusion of blood flow may cause detrimental effects on the patient. Therefore the clinician must be concerned about leaving the occluding device in place for too long. There is a need in the art for an improved guiding catheter for accessing heart vessels that can be guided through a convoluted pathway and lodged for a longer period of time in a blood vessel. The present disclosure discusses these and other needs in the art.